


We Press Through Our Halos

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, M/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-15 23:06:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 7,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3465404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collecting all the Raven Cycle poetry I've been posting <a href="http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/">to Tumblr</a> over the last couple of months. Will be updated as I post more.  Pairings/characters will be noted in chapter titles for clarity's sake and inspirations will be linked at the end of each work where applicable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. We Press Through Our Halos (Ronan Lynch)

We press through our halos as we  
grow into sin. Polished gold  
from use and crowned with thorns that  
bite into fine, hollow throat skin,  
draining the blood from adolescence  
clinging so tattered and thin.

Inevitably the snarled reflection  
dims. Dazzling youth retreats, caring  
not for the fear of emptiness in those  
closest to it. Casting onto cheek and chin  
a brambled glare. Hopeful, we strain forward,  
while the glittering past chokes in.

([Inspiration](http://half-moon-magazine.tumblr.com/post/56913841670/mens-show-fall-winter-2010-backstage-c-gerard).)


	2. There's A Boy I Know With Diamond Fists (Adam Parrish)

There’s a boy I know with diamond fists  
and he wears dust colored gloves,  
to hide the hands his mother claimed  
reflected poorly on her when he was young.

There’s a boy I know with a mirror in his heart  
meant to keep others at bay,  
because he heard once that love meant belonging  
and he’d rather stand out of the way.

There’s a boy I know with nails in his eyes  
and rebar rusting in his spine,  
he uses scavenged pieces to fix himself  
each day buying a little more time.

There’s a boy I know with skin like bark  
that cracks in the winter sun,  
who reaches his limbs out as far as he can  
convincing himself he can run.

There’s a boy I know with diamond fists  
that he buried deep in the ground,  
knowing he was the one least likely to mind  
if what he wanted was never found.


	3. Drip, Drip (Adam Parrish)

_(Drip drip.)_  
Water brought you into this world  
and won’t let you forget that it  
can take you out of it. The levee is  
smooth, and then the levee is rubble.

It takes less time to collapse  
than any of us can measure. A life  
is lived in the arc you make to  
reach forward and hang up the phone.

The lullaby that goes: ungrateful,  
stupid, lazy, pussy, worth less  
is sung in a sigh as the wells dry up.  
You’re free. There’s no inheritance.

But you own these tears, these  
trembling fists, this rage that will  
carry on in your son, silently hoping  
you won’t take fifty of his years.  
 _(Drip drip.)_


	4. Coda to Evolution, Extinction (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

In the morning grey light you wake up back to back,  
on your thin, childhood mattress. Knobby spines  
hooked like gears. You think, you move,  
I move. You think, with the right fulcrum  
two small gears can leverage the world. You’ve  
been looking for power in the sky, the soft Virginian soil,  
the future, and all the time it was right  
there, waiting for you to return a hungry gaze.

For magicians there is no magic like alchemy. Like your  
mingled summer sweat, and your sleep shallow breath.  
Like soft young flesh pricked a dozen thousand times   
until the needles had carved away a whetstone  
across his back. Like he knew you would one day  
need something to sharpen yourself against.

And while you confess to the rusted shower head,  
he will go to the church downstairs where  
he will press his lips to a mahogany pew  
and bare his black hollowed shoulders to his God in prayer.  
Thank his silent father for his complementary spine   
and perform his Hail Marys on the names  
of the mountains you’ll move together.


	5. My Eyes Are Up Here, Sweetheart (Joseph Kavinsky)

Do you know what it’s like  
to press your fingers  
into your own flesh?  
Not the way your nails cut  
into the palms of your fists,  
or how the pads on your fingers  
can leave bruises on your thighs,  
but to know what it looks like  
as your eyes hemmhorage life,  
staring over your own white knuckles  
as they arch into the skin  
on your throat. It’s so easy  
to hang people you’d never guess  
how strong those muscles are.  
And did you know that at the last  
moment, that dimming light explodes  
once more, shuddering gold,  
violent ecstasy leading release?  
I know what it’s like  
to set myself on fire.  
I take myself out so often  
in my dreams, and I can tell you  
that they’ll never understand  
what our perfect control is, or the  
power coursing through veins singing,  
begging, to be let out to play.  
I’ve made myself the king, but  
I can’t burn this world alone.  
Let’s start with the bridges.  
You wear this crown. And when  
we two are finally the tallest beings  
in any given landscape we’ll  
melt that down too, because  
lover, you deserve the finest noose.


	6. For the Spell to Work (Ronan Lynch)

There’s more blood in growing up than  
they’ll ever tell you. More blood coursing beneath  
your see through skin than was splattered across  
the tire iron or the gravel in the drive.  
Blood in your enemies.  
Blood in your family.  
Blood in your magic.  
Blood in your dreams.

There’s more lust in growing than you know  
what to do with. And the pulse that beats beneath  
his skin is drowning out your own. You know what it feels like,  
to create something from nothing.  
Rush in your ears.  
Rush in your heart.  
Rush the air from your lips  
as you pray for him to become.

There’s more hope in knowing you’re dying than  
they could ever teach you to handle. And you reach  
for the terrors that once ripped you apart, begging  
them not to leave. Hope in your destiny.  
Hope in your fear.  
Hope that you’ll know  
when it’s time, because  
you never really imagined  
you’d have to let them go.


	7. First Generation Fire (Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch)

Russian, Bulgarian, Slovakian, Czech,  
all epithets empty of meaning to  
their speakers, smoked in distrust,  
as if they can pin my father’s country  
onto my ass. You should understand.   
They don’t know it’s a joke. We’ve never seen  
our fathers’ countries, and it feels like neither  
of us will live long enough to be dragged  
back there. Our only inheritance their   
hearts of darkness, which are nothing  
like the Congo, in spite of our reading.  
No, I don’t need his killer’s country.

I’m a metal that’s been beaten to a form  
more than strong enough to shackle my own.  
But then there’s the knife in your mouth,  
held carelessly between thin lips that makes   
me crave the possibility of the blood I may   
find there. Everyone else here is made of paper,  
can’t you feel how thin this fabric has become?   
It doesn’t matter what I pull from it: not  
the high, not the fire, not the liquid I use   
to erase the rest, if I can’t also pull the beating  
diamonds from your own immigrant soul.


	8. What Your Religion Made You (Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish)

In prayer you’ve always been certain.  
A wish that starts with knuckles locked,  
lips to the cross, and a mind as clear as the water  
trembling in its brass sentinel basin, must be pure.  
Like your heart was pure, right up until the moment   
an eyelash’s flutter sent it stuttering into the sea.  
You asked for eyes in which you could live or die,  
but you hadn’t thought to imagine what  
suffocating would feel like.

Unsure, now your only peace is in sleep,  
naked you wrap yourself tight in your sheets with  
funerary reverence. Soft white shroud in a  
warm mausoleum, tinged with gold from the slipping  
evening sun, you lay yourself to rest and count:  
each of your breaths,  
each of the freckles capping his shoulders,  
each of those locked knuckles as they split and crack,  
each of the salt drop galaxies that perch at his temples,  
each of the times you wanted to kiss him.

Lips to the cross. You thought you knew what  
you wanted. Thought this wanting would end  
in a miracle. Thought the most holy bliss was to be  
found in the asking, instead learned it’s to be found  
in the transmuting of desire.

([Inspiration](http://hangingdooley.tumblr.com/post/103294374858/young-man-asleep-by-eugene-berman).)


	9. I Fucking Made You, Man (Joseph Kavinsky/Prokopenko)

He craves this touch, though it echoes of war as white  
horses trample across his trepan weakened skull.  
He can’t put a finger on his terror wrapped lust  
for this boy he doesn’t remember falling for.

For a time this creeping feeling grows, that his body’s  
not his own until the casually cruel sharp  
horror lover he knows he’s told to go to hell  
presses against his tongue: a pill, himself, a gun.

Reconciliation can only be learned in  
wombs he’s told he never graced as he watches the  
boy with his heart in his teeth dance with his corpse, make  
another him, unmake it again, prove the point.

In the wreckage his hollow maker god presses  
narrow boot to cooling flesh just to get the thin  
line of his ribs right this time. Black eyes swallow his  
soul whole to use in even greater forgeries.

Not a miracle, just a boy collecting parts  
of his figment self from fading dreams for something  
to hold on to when his blood goes quiet again  
sucked dry from the brittle bright newness of his veins.


	10. Birthmarks (Joseph Kavinsky/Prokopenko)

There in the headlights, you  
were supposed to bow for me.  
I won, I always win, but it’s hollow  
when those who are merely human  
don’t accept their place below me.

There with the flat black asphalt,  
fading into midnight, scabbed rubber  
burned into it, the smoke clinging  
to our skin you left me wanting,  
and I always get what I want.

It’s so easy to feed a starving man,  
to know what he wants and deliver,  
and as the blown pupils, set deep  
in the sharp angles of your hollow skull,  
took in my smoke and my lips, I inhaled  
the powder and all that you’d laid before me.

I take care to remember your blood  
how it ignored the ridge of  
your lips and teased your teeth,  
because every sculpture has  
a foundation and you had to be warm.

In the dream I willed you born  
of lightning and the rain  
came with it. Running in rivulets  
down your questioning face,  
like sweat, like gasoline before  
someone strikes the match.

And once burning I pressed you  
against the smoldering tree to  
test you. Dazzling blood from your nose,  
teeth on your lips, I wanted you  
accurate but ultimately malleable.

No one seems to have noticed  
that your shoulder no longer  
flinches when I’m pressed against  
it, but I left just enough pride in you  
to make the lie seem real.

And if anyone catches me staring  
well, let them believe it’s a crush,  
because I am in love with my  
vanity, with my mind that can create  
hungry boys at will, with the way  
you can now sense my power  
rushing through your yawning veins.

Love doesn’t last, not like  
fear, so when you refuse to give me  
what I want again, I let you know.  
I fucking made you, man. Just to see  
how well I mapped your mind.

There’s beauty in the firing  
of your synapses, and the way your  
heart speeds up, but it’s not enough  
anymore. I need a greater thrill.  
I need us back in the cars, slick  
and trusting and fast enough to kill.

And as the wind touches every  
strand of hair I stitched into your head  
I offer you up to that other god.  
Wondering if he will be proud,  
or also find you wanting.

And you who wouldn’t bow,  
I placed my hand  
to the back of your neck  
and pressed down.  
I always get what I want.


	11. Homily, Benediction (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

They say grace as they knit you together,  
naming you the first of all men to follow,  
stringing wings of feather fine veins  
through the muscles of your heart  
cradling it gently in both of your ribs  
so it doesn’t escape. You’ll stay whole,  
because they won’t need to remove one later  
just to build someone who loves you.  
The very sky will furl itself around you with its love.

You say grace carelessly,  
etching it into the sugar glass  
that makes up the world with the   
tips of your titanium fingers, deep white  
sparklers against the low valley night  
that cascade delicate burns over any part  
of me that gets close enough to touch.  
You don’t hear the world sneaking up   
behind you, can’t see that everything  
is reaching in to be lit.

I say grace with eyes turned upward  
knees pressed to the floor as I was taught,  
forehead against the warm groove of your hip,  
smoothed over by age and the hands  
that have made you. I didn’t know what I was  
looking for when I got caught in your shifting  
angles and started to hum along with your   
settling voice, but it wouldn’t be faith if it   
was absolute. I wouldn’t be worthy of you   
if I was simple enough to know what I   
wanted. I may still not be.

They say grace is a chorus that needs  
every voice to ring true, but I would play it  
blasphemous on my own in the center aisle  
if I thought you would hear just one string plucked,  
because it’s the closest you’ll get  
to understanding how we feel knowing   
that somewhere your feather veined heart  
is flapping against its cage, wild and  
at the edge of rebellion, having realized   
that just because they stitched you   
doesn’t mean you’re theirs.


	12. Comet (Adam Parrish)

You think yourself haunted,  
afraid to let us catch the ghosts  
hiding in the caves created by  
the dark circles under your tired eyes,  
the worried overhang of your brow.  
What you see in the white there  
around your mirrored pupils terrifies you.  
What you see is not the truth. The truth  
is that there are stars within you.  
That nothing as small as a cave system  
that webbed the entire earth could hold you.  
That your dark is only present so there’s  
something to contain your light.  
Where you see ghosts we see comets.  
Where you see an endlessly reflecting pool,  
we see a trail of fire worth wishing on.

([Inspiration](http://northmagneticpole.tumblr.com/post/99345084057/photographs-of-morehouses-comet-september-1).)


	13. I Want You, But (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

You must know that what  
I have been taught of love  
lies in bruises and blood,  
and my hesitations are in your  
function, not your form.

Not the roughness of your hands,  
but the fists they find themselves in.  
Not the width of your hallowed jaw,  
but the teeth that grind within it  
longing to bite down and leave your mark.  
Not the scent of your masculinity,  
but that sometimes when I press close  
I can smell last night’s alcohol in your pores.

I have known these things.  
I have already almost  
let them destroy me.  
I have promised myself  
never again.

You must know that  
I was raised in violence  
and there is no love there.  
Not the kind you cling to.  
Not the kind I want to hold me.

I’m not saying that you are him.  
The thought of you moves through me  
in a whole different way,  
warming cold veins with licks of flame,  
and I know that once we touch with intent  
I will never be the same.

It’s your function, not your form.  
So understand where your power lies.  
Not in magic, but in heavy eyes.  
Let’s not start with your hungry parts  
seeking to devour.  
Let’s begin with your strong, set shoulders  
already bearing my weight  
and go down from there.


	14. Less the Omen, More the Wolf (Blue Sargent/Richard Campbell Gansey III)

My unadorned lips cannot kill kings. I do not control  
men’s futures. Nor do I launch magic or ships against them.

It is a thorn of a world that would look a young girl  
straight in her clear and hopeful eye and tell her that,  
because of her pink spring swollen mouth, good men must die.

I cannot be held responsible for the blood and sweat of men.  
Their obsessions are no fault of mine.  
Not even when I am remade as one of them.

If you sometimes find thorns lodged in the love line ridden skin  
of my palms, know I got them from holding up your crown. 

Obsession is not an ornament, not a garland hung around  
my neck. It is a hunt. It is letting loose the hounds  
and then blaming the fox when the one with the most  
ambitious pride turns up drowned.

I am not prey. I am not a catalyst. I am not just a girl.  
I am not a plot point in a legend about a boy  
who simply wanted too much. I demand my own legend.

I am an impossible force. I am a clear black mirror.  
If you see yourself as great it is because I have allowed it.

I will be the lilies on your grave, placed there freely in love,  
but I will not be the shovel. You must take  
responsibility for your own digging.


	15. Please God, Give Him My Strength (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

There are worse things  
to come from than weeds and dust.  
Stronger red oaks than us  
have been seeded from less.  
The leaf tips of the branches  
closest to the sky  
shouldn’t waste their energy  
worrying about the soil,  
as long as there’s enough water  
to make it possible to survive  
until the next storm. 

I know your roots, twisted  
and tangled as they are with mine.  
Take my water. Take my sun.  
Reach up around me and take my sky.  
Just keep looking up, grasping  
at the wind with your scarlet tipped  
furls. None of that common blue  
is worth a damn if I have to stand  
watch over these hills and valleys alone. 

([Inspiration](http://jeremyfall.tumblr.com/post/6380395361).)


	16. We Flightless Others (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

He looks fine, our magician,  
in the black feathers of his station,  
their greyed blue fluorescent tinge in the half-light  
the same as the dusty craters of his eyes,  
always hungry for discovery.  
Whether he’s my monster or my prince,  
whether the light is dusk falling on our mountains  
or a lamp on at 3AM in the corner of my room,  
shattered in terror, whether the feathers give way to  
talons and teeth or a steady lifted chin and gentle hands.  
Feathered cape or feathered skin,  
they are to be plucked the same.

I found myself cast over the edge  
with no hope of climbing back,  
when I realized he could have me either way.  
That I would bare my neck regardless of whether  
he intended to meet it with lips or teeth.  
Our friends call him resplendent with sanctuary voices,  
he’s majestic or gorgeous, whispered words  
meant to dress up the growing commonness of his difference.  
I don’t want to dress it up. He’s fine, just fine.  
So fine with hollow bones and careful movements.  
If he would let me near enough I would place my heart  
between his lips and teeth myself and accept  
whichever fate pleases him, our magician.


	17. I Have Not Dreamed This, What Is It? (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

When I was a boy I dreamed up a brother  
with golden curls and soft, blushing cheeks,  
a laugh like thin glass lips knocked together,  
and a nature that would draw the birds from the sky  
with a glint more enviable than their freedom.  
I created the boy I wanted to be, though  
I didn’t realize it until much later.  
What I’m saying is,  
we are all capable of more than we believe.  
I’ve found myself to be infinite,  
but even so I do not think that I could ever  
look within and create a brother as beautiful  
as what became when the universe  
knit itself together in you.

I’d still give you your rough body and sloping back,  
drawing inspiration from the hills  
where it learned to bear its weight.  
Make you dusty and human all the way through  
in a way that I am not.  
Born twice of blood and untouchable  
to my half-dreamt hands.  
So instead I will work on a world you deserve:  
lightning the color of the sea that would fork  
through your trees and leave their roots humming,  
rose water to make us laugh for hours  
so that I can be close to the distilled essence of you,  
arms made to take you the way you long to be held,  
the way I can’t let myself hold you.

And hard as I try,  
as many wonders as I discard,  
I will never be able to dream up a reason  
for you to need me.  
I have already dreamed up a beautiful brother,  
I will never create anything as breathtaking as you.

([Inspiration](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/111966900415/the-inventor-of-invented-things-opens-his-eyes).)


	18. Just Him & Her, A Borrowed Bed (Noah Czerny & Blue Sargent)

Being liminal has not made me feel any less a sense of who I am,  
inside my mind I’m sharp and clear. I know I’m Noah,  
at least as surely as I did when I was that boy who absorbed  
the careless touches around him. Maybe more certain,  
now that I know more about the world I spent so long brushing against,  
ignoring. But it’s still hard not to feel like I’m missing out on life  
when all of your pulses sing so close to your skins,  
so very close to my own breathless form.

I can’t remember what my pulse felt like  
as it was contained within or as it spilled out,  
leaving my life to seep into the land and tie me there.  
I can’t remember how my muscles ached or how heavy  
my bones could be in my bed after a long day.  
It’s hard to imagine the bones you know  
having ever been in me at all.

That was the most painful part, beginning again,  
the numbness, coming to terms with the fact that,  
even after I could manifest a body, I would never feel it,  
and that was worse than the year I spent as a whisper,  
the whole of me living as a guilt in the back  
of someone else’s conscience. Yes,  
the dead know when you think of them.

Even as I press myself to you in practice,  
I cannot remember what this is supposed to feel like,  
the slick slide of lips over lips that made my heart race when I was alive  
with its promise of more and skin and tongue and more.  
I can only feel your heat, your assertive aliveness eating away  
at the coldness of me. Can only feel the ramp up of energy  
that always rolls in before you,  
a herald with an electric blue trumpet,  
sound surging through the echo I have become.

Thank you, thank you, for allowing me this.  
It may be the closest I ever again come to a pulse.


	19. She Called Him a Lighthouse (Richard Campbell Gansey III)

It’s the bright boys who want for nothing  
that find themselves needing everything.  
The young beacons who won’t allow for defeat,  
who pull the gold they need from the dust of the world  
with bleeding quicks and tongue chapped lips, who have  
no magic outside of that granted by their fear and hope.

They believe in the world they want to see,  
so that world lets them find it, and each new discovery  
feels heady. Suddenly they can’t let go of the tails  
of the world’s wonders where they try to hide in their  
quiet caves, leading these bright and haloed boys  
down into thick darkness where they hope to prove  
that they too can create beautiful things from nothing.

That in spite of their softness they too can be sharpened.  
They too can be worthy. They too are not empty,  
in spite of their desirous hearts that will not ever  
get their fill of the possible. In spite of having all  
of everything at their fingertips and still reaching past  
the whole of the world, desperately needing more.


	20. Even Lonely Mountains Can Be Set Alight (Adam Parrish)

How like Sisyphus you long to feel,  
as your skin splits open against the boulders,  
the rock and the trees and your back and shoulders  
caked in the soil you were grown in.  
Alone on your mountain, unknowable,  
fighting a battle against the very land and  
for every step forward pressed another four back,  
one for each person allowed to love you.

This is futile.

Almost as futile as acknowledging the heart,  
that for seventeen years you weren’t even sure was there,  
since you could never hear it over the empty fear  
that your tyrant god poured into you.  
And if you’d paid attention to the myths  
it would be this self-deceit, first and foremost,  
that you would accept your punishment for.  
Second for the murder of your mother’s peace.

But these crimes remain untried as you’ve chained yourself  
to a different peak for the virtue of your pride and though  
you’re half deaf from righteous fury you can finally hear  
your blood speak as it pounds against your eardrums,  
angry and warm and proof that you’re alive.

On the mountain opposite there is smoke and flame,  
and how like Sisyphus you long to feel,  
how like the ghost we must imagine  
happy in his pitiable exile,  
except your blood has whispered to you that  
somewhere there’s a young man caped with flame  
and your now living heart has gotten the better of you  
with its questions like,  
what would it feel like to not bleed,  
but burn?


	21. Being Broken Means You’re Breathing (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

Dad, he used a stone to sharpen his knife  
and you can still hear the sawing slice in your dreams.  
 _Thwick_. Thin like the box of matches you keep in secret,  
for when you need a manifestation for your simmering rage.  
 _Thwick_. Flat like this valley where there’s nowhere to hide,  
nestled in rough fingered mountains you long to escape.  
 _Thwick_. Grey like the weathered outside of your home,  
a reminder that even your breath is owed to him.  
 _Thwick_. Hard like the thing he’s hammering you into,  
with each new break of your frangible bones.

You never intended to become that knife,  
even though it was clear he loved it more than you.  
Clear in the way he took the time to keep it sharp,  
when his attention only ever managed to pound you dull.  
But that knife was good for so many things, and you,  
you wanted to be worthy, so you fancied yourself ground fine.  
Borrowed its edges til you could scrape away your own.  
Bled anyone who came close to you because dirty,  
unpleasant, mean as cuss things tend to survive.  
And against all odds you are still here.

It’s a true knife that shows you you’re only the stone,  
still clenched tight in his fists, a tool that brings out  
the cruelty in men who’ve been itching for a fight.  
And his kisses bruise and he has blood on his hands,  
but at least you’re no longer unstitching your veins alone.  
His eyes make you necessary, his breath makes you dizzy.  
You think every blow you’ve taken has been leading to this.  
It’s easier to love him than it is to love yourself, clear in how  
you feel you were made for him to slide his tongue across.  
 _Thwick_. Like finally having a reason to be anything at all.


	22. Belief, Imperfect and Mortal (Joseph Kavinsky)

The world burns sharp and gold for the time it takes you  
to climb out of his bed, down the stairs, into the night.  
You understand life and death perfectly. The universe  
is unravelling around you. Helicase, your lips unzipping  
his spine as your drugs burn him away to nothing. Kinase,  
you take what’s left of the taste of him in your mouth  
and use it to build a replicant: white neon skin, black pitch  
muscle, red sap blood. You are most proud of the blood,  
sweeter even than it had been, bubbling in the silver spoon  
while you hold the flame under it so you can take this hit  
of godliness, skittering away from the come down  
in the name of reckless, fearful hedonism, because you  
don’t recognize yourself in mirrors when you’re sober,  
because you look like a tired and narrow boy when you know  
that if you could dig into your skin you would find the scales  
you long to wear on the outside. You’ve tried digging them  
out with your claws, tried to make others dig them out,  
thrusting into their bodies so violently that there’s no recourse  
but to sink nails into back and teeth into shoulder and hold on.  
This never nets you wings. Yet you try again and again  
and you leave your creation in the dark, licking your come out  
of his mouth, taking with you your briar thrash blood streaked thighs  
and the knowledge that death trembles in your wake.  
Death trembles, shudders, comes to a halt in front of you  
in the form of a boy on his knees in the grass, asleep.  
The three of you aren’t touching. His arms rip themselves to shreds  
all the same. You covet those invisible claws almost as much as  
you covet this new blood. Death lowers his scythe. Every exhalation  
you let go is a prayer that reads _yes, I will bear witness_ ,  
but Death has less to prove than you and more time to do it,  
so he touches the point of his tool to the boy’s heaving shoulders.  
Knights him to keep him out of your reach. Your heart dims,  
pitches dark. It’s a lesson, a challenge, and as your short lived  
understanding bleeds away, cold darkness takes its place.  
Darkness that will only be satisfied once you’ve unzipped his spine,  
once it’s his sap you’re tapping and burning and drinking,  
once his nails go digging for who you truly are.


	23. Echo and Remnant (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

My thoughts were louder before we walled them up. They kept me up nights, squabbling over the scraps of my day–you’ll find starving dogs in every trailer park–and when I wouldn’t let them howl they would climb quietly from my eyes, waving their flags. They always relayed what they knew to you somehow, in spite of my efforts to keep them cloistered with their sins and to keep my shouting, raucous gaze on anything but you.

Now they cower under the branches of the trees that have taken their place and they murmur of rebellion. I am the traitor they long to cut down for failing to diffuse the live wire charges I knew would one day go off on them, for seeing you as brave, even though you couldn’t save them either. As an act of penance you pass them your secrets, your dry lips and warm breath brushing the skin of my ear. If I concentrate it’s almost like I can hear again.

Feeling around in the vibration I can piece together the round vowels of your confession. I pretend not to know. I pretend not to know a lot of things, preferring that you think my sudden muteness is a symptom of a broken body and not a fearful mind. Because now I can hear the echoes of the universe in my ruptured eardrum the same way you’d hear the ocean in a shell. It is too much and I am too small and you loom far too large to have ever been real.

Now I know your laugh is stitched into the ripples of the big bang. Your ozone laced blood spills from an unending nebula beneath your skin. It all siphons through me and I can taste it in the back of my throat, let myself get drunk on it to keep my mind still. I used think I understood us, before I knew just how much there was that went into understanding. These days I keep my eyes on you. These days I keep one ear to the ground and one to the stars.


	24. Dare (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

We both know this life’s a fight, but you’ve been   
toe to toe with it since you caught your first whiff of blood.   
I can see your peekaboo pity, though you try   
to hide it under heavy lidded eyes, because some boys’   
fathers teach them to fight and some boys’ fathers   
teach them to lie down and wait until the blood   
has been wrung out into the open to assess the damage. 

You don’t believe in simple survival, your artist hands   
wringing blood from scenes that had previously   
only called for lilting contempt or pursed lips.   
You think you can teach me better, try. You’ll find   
my hesitation is not broken, my spine is not crochet,   
my desire for blood just as great, only cannibalistic.   
Use your teeth. Show me how you’d eat me away. 

I’ll show you in turn how to swallow this hatred whole,   
how to earn your place in this world, how I’ll earn   
your lust fair and square before I’ll even consider  
the lips covering my destruction in your mouth.


	25. Hopeful (Adam Parrish)

You were nine when the cicadas  
last came in their droves,  
with wings that scratched  
and cries that taught you   
not all music needed  
adhere to formal structure,  
like the bodies they left   
crumpled against the tree trunks   
that you picked off one by one  
looking for one that wasn’t hollow,  
trying to determine what it meant   
to leave so much of yourself behind.

At night you laid in the grass,   
young clear head in the crook   
of your mother’s elbow while you   
watched the Perseids flit across the sky,   
asked her if they too left husks  
behind somewhere, maybe clinging  
to the dark spots on the moon.  
She warned you against being taken  
by things bright and hollow, so unlike  
the fairy tales of grass beetles that   
would always be your story.

Like love, and you didn’t think to ask  
whether love was bright or if it was  
like you. Now you know. Now  
as he stands across from you  
holding the miracle he brought back from  
his dreams: shiny, dark, empty thing that   
defies its form. That’s what love looks like.  
He is not hollow, but he is cavernous,   
privy to so much more of life  
than you were born to know.

Even now there’s hay at your ankles,  
you are still searching the sky and you  
know this will hurt, know it might end  
with your own husk hanging against the bark.  
You tip yourself into him anyway,  
because there’s one thing all those   
grassland fairy tales had in common:  
to defeat the uncertainty stalking  
in the dark, you had start with hope.


	26. A Moment (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

Your hands are bleeding. You are always carelessly  
giving up blood–for your family, for your livelihood,  
for the air you breathe. You don’t even notice.  
I notice. I am a creature who craves blood and  
I can smell it, escaping through the cracks in your skin.  
Is this what you want? Are you trying to escape this way,  
slowly, because you think no one will be able to tell,  
that we won’t be able to stop you until it’s too late?  
Or are you just so full of life that it’s nothing to you  
when some of it is misplaced? Either way boy,  
your skin is ill-fitting of late, growing looser over  
your exhalation bones every day. I think  
I would like to gather it at the back of your neck  
and place my lips to where yours are pulled tight  
and breathe the light back into you.  
You’ve always been a wonder, but standing next to you  
now, your exhaustion catching, I can feel the desire  
to make you my wonder unfurling. You will ask why,  
but I don’t know. All I know is that this morning I was  
fine on my own and now I am coveting the blood you lose  
and there was no negotiation with the space between.


	27. Courtship, Savagery (Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch)

The whole of the universe is caught glittering  
in the webbed cracks of the windshield,  
like the diamond necklaces your mother uses  
to cover the bruises at her throat,  
cut dark, hollow, sharp, like him.

In some states if you scrape an animal  
off the pavement you get to keep it,  
so you took him home to make him your meal,  
sliced at his flesh to leach out the miasma  
of hope that might stain your teeth.

They say when young men go hunting  
in lust they seek their mothers. That might be  
true. You don’t covet love, but the grace  
with which they both crack their heads  
on the porcelain. She is also devout.

You bring him roses in the shape of  
your torn knuckles, delicate blood petals unfurling  
across blistered skin, pressed the ragged thorns  
of your fingernails against his lips  
and demanded reciprocation

like the blade of a saw. He sucked the ichor  
from your fingertips, singed your spirit holy  
where it ran across his tongue,  
burning away the atheism that had grown  
up your rib trellis in rampant, tangled vines.

Confessed your barren need in the blistering sun  
with your hands working the labyrinth of his skin,  
virgin clumsy and angel proud as he sank  
into your carefully built oblivion, yet another  
universe of terror impacted cut glass stars.


	28. Anti-Matter (Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch)

You’re thinking about death as you lay in your bed, pulse quickening in your wrists while your fingers trail from your throat to your thighs. Of fire and blood, but also of its brother, silence and stillness, about how closely those things cling to each other in the black just beyond your reach.

You wonder if you could pass from the mouth of one to the other as they kiss. You think maybe death could be a street race. A great swallowing, hurtling through the darkness, chasing the tail lights ahead that whip the asphalt into frenzied waves of glittering smoke pavement. There are oceans you never think about beneath the rubber bridges you are scorching down into the ground. The only map you thought to bring with you is etched into the lines of your knuckles, white on the wheel. It will be enough. Because you own this land, because you know what you’re looking for even though you won’t admit it.

He is white, white, white, white in the night. Ghost of shirt, shoulder, teeth, shades. There was no moon behind your eyelids until he caught fire and even now the moon does not hang placidly against the sky collecting stars. The moon hurtles around you in orbit at thousands of miles an hour. There are enough g-forces in this turn to take you both to another country. To trace the lines of your progenitors down the palms of the universe as you use your own palms to tear into each other and rip such simple memories as being born to shreds. Neither of you wants to have been born. How lonely and filthy it is not to have simply been created.

Where he touches you in flight and fight there are scorch marks. You don’t know why you do this to yourself. He wouldn’t have been enough while he was alive and his shadow is not enough now, but at least it knows what you want and it will acknowledge the carnal carrion flock that shifts restlessly in you. With his murmuration laugh that sounds like the flapping of wings, like calling like, and a hunger that is too great even now. You can give yourself over to his shadow because you think you own it, because now everything in your dreams with claws listens to you. Now that you’ve stopped hiding from the truest parts of your nature, the parts that he was able to sniff out in seconds. You know all of this now and you are pushing down how much this ownership of his replicant body makes you feel like him.

And how is it possible that he knew you better than you did? How is it possible the cruelty of his mirrored gaze never returned any of that knowledge home? How is it that his phantom limbs can bring you back to center in this emptiness you create within yourself? If you stop panting long enough to think you’ll know. You’ll know now that you’ve acknowledged your desires they are awake and slipping alive inside of you, sinking barbed tendrils into every one of your thoughts, gnawing slowly at your heart, and you need to lose yourself to them before you go mad. So you sleep, and in your sleep you are racing against him and racing toward him, and there is the smoke that you covet and there is the gasoline that you desire and there is the fire that you fear and you are willing the crash that will make of you so much broken glass underneath his tongue. You are a haunted terror of a boy, and this ghost is the only one who understands.

In your waking hours there is too much to say, so you fall silent. In the light that hides in others’ eyes there is so much else you don’t want to lose. There is a powerful and beautiful boy whom you would beg to touch you like this just once if you didn’t fear that one slip of your own tongue would drive him away forever. So you are driven here with purpose, by the salt sweat on your lips, with one hand scrabbling beneath your sheets and one hand pressed to your own neck, trying to squeeze his seed from your throat. You won’t succeed. He burrowed himself into you and now you will always find him.

You can’t leave until he’s scratched the map home into your back. There is base pleasure here, sure, but there is something else, too. Something you have always wanted to touch, something that knows itself and won’t tell you its name. He is as much a mystery as he ever was. He is a graceful, slope-eyed creature who says cruel things with his knife blade lips and you love the blood they draw for keeping you warm. You know him and you don’t know him and you will try to figure it out for months, but the only thing you’ll really remember when you wake in your cold sweat is that in the aftermath he presses his hot mouth against the hollow of your cold throat and thanks you for trapping him in this purgatory when what he was expecting was his father’s hell.


	29. You guys have a death list? (Ronan Lynch & Blue Sargent)

_What the fuck?_  
comes out before he realizes he’s said it.  
What he means to say is,  
_Why did you hide this from me?_  
_Why don’t you trust me?_  
 _I thought you loved me._  
 _I thought you loved him._  
Because the anger hits first,  
always hits first, fists clenched against  
a brother’s knuckles to the jaw,  
a friend’s words to the gut,  
those who react quickly live, truly.

She flinches, expecting this, and  
as her body pulls away from him,  
a body that has come to trust him so  
reneging on that trust, he can tell  
that it’s not anger. Not really.  
It’s his father’s blood.  
It’s his friend’s long dead body.  
It’s his lover’s bruises and fragile bones.  
It’s everything they are, and it’s  
going to end. In fear. Hers and his.

_I’m sorry,_  
comes out before he can stop himself.  
What he means to say is,  
_Why did you hide this from me?_  
_Why don’t you trust me?_  
 _I thought you loved me._  
 _I thought you loved him._  
Because the time for anger has passed,  
as she buries her face in his chest,  
shakes in his arms. There won’t  
be forgiveness for this, but  
God willing, there will be time to try.


End file.
